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Teaching

As a teacher, I strive to achieve a fruitful balance between my European formation, subject-based and attentive to structure and form, and its North-American development, learner-based, pragmatic and open to flexibility. Whenever feasible, in order to provide fuller cultural snapshots, my courses take students off the beaten path, blending classics and lesser-known cultural items that also resonate through society. With due regards to course needs, I enjoy enhancing instruction with hands-on activities, such as facsimile document translation (publisher catalogs, travel/official brochures, comics), webzine publishing, and film subtitling and overdubbing (fiction and documentary). I don’t, however, need elaborate setups for productive teaching sessions. In the end, your voice and writing materials are all you really need. I am grateful for the support I received during my visiting positions at Vassar College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Here is a sample of what I taught at Northern Illinois University. I redeveloped some existing courses to broaden their links to professional applications, all the while providing solid theoretical foundations. Blue denotes courses and activities I created for the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures:

Trivia: Would you have guessed that satire of gimmicks in teaching already existed as early as the 1830s, and in comic-strip form, no less? It comes from Rodolphe Töpffer, himself an educator and proponent of such progressive approaches to teaching in his time as hands-on experience of nature and image-based education of the illiterate. He started out as a schoolteacher, became the director of a boarding school, and eventually the first professor of rhetoric at the Geneva Academy. Today, outside of his native Switzerland, he is mostly recognized as the “father of the comic strip.”